My current knitting project

My new shoulder warmer

I want to show you my current knitting project today: a "shoulder warmer."

Somehow, I often feel cold, especially when I'm tired. But not that cold, not completely cold, just a little. A slight chill, so to speak. A real Icelandic sweater ( lopapeysa ) is too warm for me then. But I still need something.

After seeing a knitted hood with a scarf in Iceland that I found very cozy, I thought I could knit something like that myself... So I came up with the idea of ​​knitting a "shoulder warmer," essentially a turtleneck with a round yoke and then finished with a border. A short poncho, so to speak.

As a model, I tried to depict a typical Icelandic landmark, namely the tower of Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík.

Here you can see my first attempt, which was recently finished.

My shoulder warmer isn't quite perfect yet; there are a few things I'd like to do differently next time. But overall, I'm very satisfied – and I find my shoulder warmer very comfortable. And nice and warm!

Here we did a photo session in front of Hallgrímskirkja, capturing the original and the fake in one shot, so to speak. As you can see, I had a lot of fun taking these photos!

Here is an overview of our photos.

[Translated from here.]

Þorramatur

After the delicious Christmas goods disappeared from the supermarkets, the glazed hams, the roasted ptarmigan and all the other delicacies, the new seasonal goods have now arrived in the freezers: Þorramatur .

Lots of very special delicacies for your very own Þorrablót at home, to which you can invite friends and relatives.

Thorrablot

The Þorrablót was an ancient Nordic sacrificial festival celebrated between mid-January and mid-February. Everything that had a long shelf life in winter was eaten, especially pickled foods such as black pudding and liver sausage, mutton testicles, whale meat, seal fins... Sounds delicious, doesn't it? In recent decades, this ancient pagan tradition has been revived in Iceland (see the notes below for more on the history of Þorrablót).

Today you can easily get almost everything you need for a hearty Þorrablót in the supermarket:

Lots of very special traditional Þorramatur such as lamb meat heavily smoked over sheep dung ( hangikjöt ), salt meat ( saltkjöt ), sheep's head brawn ( sviðasulta ), pickled ram testicles ( súrsaðirhrútsprungar ), black pudding ( blóðmör ), liver sausage ( lifrapylsa ), rolled meat ( lundabaggar ), breast meat ( bringukol lar ), dried fish ( harðfiskur ) and rotten shark ( hákarl ).

We didn't dare touch the 2 kg bucket with various súrmatur (= meat products marinated in whey), ...

... but just to be on the safe side, just buy a small Þorrabakki (= serving tray with Þorramatur) with four different specialties, plus a classic pack of mashed turnips ( rófustappa ) and a pack of mashed potatoes ( kartöflumús ).

Traditionally, sweet rye bread ( rúgbrauð ) and flatbread ( flatbrauð ) with butter are served with it.

The Þorramat is actually eaten cold, with warm mashed turnips, warm mashed potatoes and bread served with it.

To be honest - not even that tasty for a Central European palate.

We didn't agree on what we liked the least - my husband found the testicles quite edible, but there were too many solid spots in the salted meat and he didn't like the sheep's head brawn at all. I found the testicles far too sour and too much goo, but I was able to eat the brawn with enough mashed potatoes and turnips to some extent. But really tasty - no, neither of us found it really tasty.

PS: The history of Þorrablót

Þorrablót is an ancient Nordic sacrificial festival celebrated in the fourth winter month of the Old Icelandic calendar ( Þorri ). Literally translated, Þorrablót means something like “blood (sacrifice) in the month of Þorri”.

The month of Þorri begins on the first Friday between January 19th and 26th. This month is also called the “drought month” - it is the month in which all supplies were finally used up and there was nothing new, fresh to eat.

In the past, people used to celebrate a big festival on the farms this month, taking turns in the neighborhood, at which traditional Icelandic food was served, everything that could be kept for a long time in winter - for example pickled foods such as black pudding and liver sausage, pickled mutton testicles, pickled things Whale meat... there was a lot of eating, drinking and sinking at these festivals. However, this "pagan festival" soon became a thorn in the side of the Christians and so it was forgotten or frowned upon over the centuries.

The first recorded Þorrablót of modern times took place in 1873, organized by a group of Icelandic students. Starting around 1880, the Icelandic Antiquities Society held an annual festive Þorrablot. In the 1950s, local heritage associations in the countryside also offered festive buffets for Þorrablót. The Naustið restaurant in Reykjavík began offering Þorramatur in 1958 to give city residents the opportunity to try this traditional Icelandic dish.

[Translated from here.]

My very personal review of 2023

Takk fyrir árið sem er að líða

Thank you for the year that has now passed – in Iceland, it is customary to always express gratitude for the past – thank you for the last meeting, thank you for your last visit, thank you for your last call, your last kind words, your last help... And it is equally customary to express gratitude for the past year, and also for the people who have accompanied you during this past year – as relatives, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, colleagues, customers, business partners...

I would also like to thank you for the past year:

• To my readers here on the blog, who gave me almost 20,000 hits on the blog in December - for a small blog like mine, that's a lot, I think!
• With the people I meet on social media, some of whom feel almost familiar because I "know" each other from reading them regularly.
• To the people who enjoy my posts, my pictures, my recipes and my personal experiences from our heartland, Iceland.
• To the very people who gave me such wonderful feedback on my posts and my recipes.
• To the people we met by chance (whether on the street in Frankfurt, at the Iceland colloquium in Cologne or simply while hiking in Reykjadalur) and to whom we owe very special experiences.
• To the people with whom we worked successfully in 2023.
• To all the lovely people who visited us here in Iceland last year, whether just for a quick coffee or for an overnight stay.

You have simply enriched all of our lives!

For us personally, 2023 was a good year:

We were able to spend a total of almost four months in Iceland in our little house here. My special edition on Icelandic cuisine published by "Zauber des Nordens" (="Magic of the North" was published in March 2023.

We had three overnight visitors from Germany, each staying for about a week, to whom we were able to give their first impressions of Iceland. We often had lovely people visiting us, sometimes overnight or at least briefly for a coffee or maybe a piece of cake.

So many good reasons to be thankful for the past year 2023!

My most successful pictures on Instagram 2023

On Instagram, you can view your " best of nine " pictures from the past year - that's what I did, too.

Here you can see these pictures – first the two of us, with the special edition of "Magic of the North." Then my husband, in front of the rainbow at Skógafoss. A dessert in Icelandic colors. An Icelandic sweater in its natural habitat. Waffles. My Icelandic sweater "Kjötsúpa," with meat soup motifs, which I had actually knitted for Meat Soup Day at Skólavörðustígur (which didn't happen this year). Swimming in +40°C water at -20°C outside. My Lopapeysa gingerbread. And me again, in a rainbow T-shirt, on the Rainbow Road, up Skólavörðustígur in Reykjavík to Hallgrímskirkja.

Oh yes, actually a nice cross-section of my year 2023.

Visit to the Island House

Last year, we had three lovely visitors from Germany, whom we were able to give their first impressions of Iceland. In June, a dear colleague of mine was here with his family; in the summer, we were able to show Child 3's friend a bit of Iceland; and in the fall, we were able to show Child 4's school friend, who was here for a good week during the holidays.

I still enjoy showing people our beloved island - even though the program is usually more or less the same for a few days in Iceland: Golden Circle, Brúarfoss, the south coast to Vík, a day in Reykjavík, once in Reykjadalur... but I still enjoy doing it again and again!

My personal year 2023

Our year started with a lot of snow here in Iceland. The day before, we had pulled a neighbor out of the snow after he'd backed off the road (before we had a very similar problem ourselves the next day and ultimately had to be pulled out of a ditch by the farmer from the neighboring farm). In this picture, I'm standing with my shovel in front of the wall of snow, next to the road—just for scale.

My birthday is in March – and this year I was able to celebrate my birthday here in Iceland with dear friends – and I really enjoyed it! Incidentally, they were all (former) students of our Icelandic teacher, whom we met personally here in Iceland through this connection and who have become true friends.

After the snowy winter, in which temperatures often reached -20°C for days, I was very happy about the first tentative days of summer, even though nature was actually relatively late in coming after the winter...

In August, we went to Gleðiganga, the Pride Parade in Reykjavík. I think this parade has something very special and personal about it that I love every year. So we went to the parade again in 2023 – and this year I had specially "knitted" us in rainbow colors, or rather, my chic little hat was crocheted from the leftover wool from my jacket.

My husband was still there during the volcanic eruption, just before the eruption at Fagradalsfjall stopped...

This fall, we had a very special visitor: a ptarmigan that rested extensively on our patio, wandered around for a long time, and finally left us a few sausages on our patio table as a farewell treat. But no matter – it gave us some beautiful photos! (And no – the ptarmigan didn't become our Christmas roast!)

One last autumn impression from the sea...

And finally, our year ended with two New Year's Eve bonfires here.

Our literary highlight of 2023...

.... was a tip for Joachim B. Schmidt's reading at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The author was born in Switzerland but has lived in Iceland with his family for years. I had heard about his book "Kalmann" before, read about it, or even seen him on TV, but somehow I hadn't yet gotten around to reading it.

My husband met the literary father of "Kalmann" in person in Frankfurt in October 2023, when he read from his second Kalmann book, "Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain," and talked about the book and its origins.

After this reading, I read "Kalmann" – a book that absolutely captivated me, with its protagonist who is so different from others, with his own unique pace – and at the end, a slight punch in the gut when the "solution" to the murder case was quite surprising (at least for me). I think the book is brilliant and subsequently read (or, you could say, devoured) "Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain" and "Near the Coast" by Joachim B. Schmidt.

By the way, our son recently came home with a book he'd found for a few euros at a secondhand store, which he thought would definitely be something for us: "A Soldier Sits at the Table." It's also a novel by Joachim B. Schmidt, set in Iceland. So I have something to read again, yay!

My knitting projects 2023

I got quite a bit of knitting done last year. I knitted this pattern from the book "Icelandic Knitting" four times because I found it so wonderful, and also so wonderfully uncomplicated. So here are four of the same pattern in Léttlopi wool, only in different colors – once in purple and shades of gray as a sweater, once in bright green with purple, red, and gold as a cardigan for myself, once in blue, white, and red (the Icelandic national colors) as a lopapeysa for my husband, and finally, at my special request, once again as a cardigan for my sister, this time with black as the base color, a reddish-brown as the second color, and yellow and green for the pattern.

Oh yes - I think all four are simply beautiful!

I also finally managed to knit a lopapeysa for my youngest son, who made it with Viking motifs (also from the book "Icelandic Knitting").

At Christmas, we took family photos of the whole team, all wearing Icelandic sweaters (okay, two of the sweaters were bought, but the others were all hand-knitted!).

My last knitting project for 2023 was (once again) a cat hat. Again, a custom project, this time knitted with double Plötulopi yarn and featuring brown and beige mottled cats.

My culinary discoveries 2023

And finally, since we are on a food blog, here are my personal favorite recipes from 2023:

Once a vanilla cake that I spontaneously baked here using "on-board ingredients" and which was so delicious that I have had it several times since then, once a very tasty saltfish pudding with melted butter, bread and salad, then a Christmas blueberry jam with spices that I simply fell in love with (the recipe is in the current 2024.1 issue of "Magic of the North") and once a cheese dip with biscuits, with cream cheese, sour cream, grated cheese as well as onions and bacon, I have made this dip many times because we like it so much and it has always been so well received by visitors.

With that in mind - thank you very much for our year 2023!

[Translated from here.]